CONTENT CREATION

Podcast 13 min read

Content Marketing Consultant

with Ryan Robinson

Chris Do and Ryan Robinson examine how useful content becomes trust, client relationships, and consulting revenue.

Chris Do

Founder, The Futur™ · November 24, 2025

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A Website Is Not a Waiting List

A polished website can still leave a business invisible. Being available is not the same as being considered. Ryan Robinson, a content marketing consultant who describes creating and promoting long-form blog content for companies including Close.io, Zendesk, LinkedIn, and QuickBooks, has built his work around that gap.

His perspective matters because he operates on both sides of the transaction. He creates content that helps companies attract prospective customers, then uses his own publishing to establish relationships with those companies. The service and the sales method reinforce each other.

Chris Do identifies the problem without dressing it up: creatives often do little to make themselves easier to find. A website establishes a destination, but it does not automatically give anyone a reason to arrive. Awareness has to be created before a prospective client can evaluate the work.

That is the starting point of this conversation, not its destination. Robinson's approach moves beyond visibility into a harder question: what happens between someone encountering expertise and deciding to pay for it?

Content is evidence before it is a sales pitch.

Robinson describes content marketing as education built from experience, skills, and core competencies. A company teaches something connected to its business, makes that teaching useful, and becomes a resource people remember when they need more help. The commercial proposition sits behind the usefulness rather than interrupting it.

This changes the role of an article. It is not simply a place to announce that a company understands sales, design, or marketing. It is an opportunity to demonstrate that understanding clearly enough for someone else to apply it.

Robinson calls the competitive dynamic a “race to the top.” More companies publishing means the reader has more alternatives. Generic advice has to compete with material that is more complete, more specific, or better suited to the problem at hand.

His answer is not that everyone should become a prolific blogger. It is that every business needs a credible way to make its knowledge visible. Writing happens to be his preferred instrument, not a universal prescription.

The distinction is important for creative professionals who already feel pressure to perform in every medium. Content marketing, in Robinson's account, begins with something the practitioner can genuinely teach. The delivery format comes afterward.

That tension between creative identity and commercial responsibility also frames Moving from Makers to Entrepreneurs. Here, the shift is concrete: expertise cannot remain entirely inside paid engagements if prospective buyers need evidence before commissioning one.

Nor does public teaching eliminate the need for a service. Robinson describes companies giving away substantial knowledge while expecting some readers to want a paid product, deeper support, or help taking the next step. Education and paid work serve different levels of commitment.

The mistake is treating every encounter as if that commitment already exists.

A reader arriving at a guide is not necessarily shopping for a consultant. A marketing director opening an email is not necessarily ready to commission a project. Robinson's system respects those differences rather than trying to force them into a single transaction.

The Format Should Follow the Talent

Robinson did not describe content marketing as a childhood calling. Finance and accounting initially appealed to him because relatives worked in those fields and the professions appeared stable. His account of finding marketing is less about discovering a fixed identity than testing alternatives.

Internships became part of that testing. He worked in finance and at a mobile app development startup while studying business, entrepreneurship, and marketing. The startup exposed him to a founder who used partnerships to grow the company.

What interested Robinson was not simply the presence of recognizable names. It was the structure behind the deals: development work connected to promotional commitments, and partnerships tied to getting people to download an app. Marketing was attached to an observable action.

That early exposure helps explain the shape of his later consulting. He does not describe publishing as an isolated creative act. He repeatedly connects what gets made with how it travels and what the audience does afterward.

But his production method begins with a narrower decision.

The best format makes existing expertise easier to see.

Robinson says writing comes relatively easily to him. At the time of the conversation, he describes publishing substantial guides on his own blog, often around 10,000 words, with the ambition of becoming the definitive resource on a topic.

The length is his chosen response to competition. It is not evidence that every subject needs the same treatment, or that an article becomes useful once it crosses a numerical threshold. His underlying ambition is completeness.

For designers, he proposes a different route. Rather than competing with specialist writers on their terms, they can show how they evaluate design. A detailed teardown or a considered response to a rebrand makes their judgment visible in the medium where that judgment is strongest.

A design teardown can reveal how a practitioner sees a brand's decisions.
A video critique can explain what succeeds and what fails in a rebrand.
A written guide can show the depth of a consultant's knowledge.
An interview can bring a subject specialist's experience into the work.

These are not interchangeable production assignments. Each creates a different kind of proof. The writer demonstrates clarity and depth; the designer demonstrates perception and reasoning; the interviewer draws useful knowledge out of another person.

Do introduces an important complication. A public critique aimed at a company does not automatically make that company want to hire its author. Attention earned through criticism and trust earned through judgment are not the same thing.

Robinson's answer moves the discussion away from spectacle. The work becomes a reason to contact someone, not an entitlement to a contract. A critique opens a possible relationship only if the practitioner handles the next interaction with care.

The editorial question is therefore larger than whether a piece will attract views. It is whether the piece displays an ability a relevant buyer values. The neighboring question of channel choice appears in Where To Start With Social Media, but Robinson's starting point remains the ability itself.

A professional does not need to imitate another creator's strongest format. The more useful task is identifying what can be demonstrated convincingly, then building a publishing practice around that evidence.

The Email Arrives After the Evidence

Robinson's account of winning work from Close.io gives the strategy a specific shape. He says he took a quotation from its founder, Steli Efti, incorporated it into a blog post, and waited until the article had gained roughly a thousand shares before making contact.

The opening was not a request for a consulting contract. It was a notification that Efti had been included in something receiving attention. Robinson had already created the reason for the conversation.

That relationship eventually became paid content work. The order matters: published material, a relevant introduction, a developing relationship, then an engagement. Reversing that sequence would turn the first email into another unsolicited demand.

Robinson is explicit that most of his initial outreach does not immediately produce paid work. The story illustrates a route into a relationship, not a guaranteed conversion formula.

Do names the mechanism: “There's a lot of micro conversions that lead into a big one.”

A person can open an email, recognize a useful contribution, respond, and become more familiar with the sender without being ready to buy. Those smaller commitments are not failed sales. They are different stages of a relationship.

Earn the next conversation, not the entire contract.

Robinson's outreach is selective. He first identifies the person whose role fits the service: someone responsible for content marketing when pitching writing, or a creative director when the work concerns design. The contact is attached to an actual responsibility rather than a vague hope that someone will forward it.

Email is his preferred channel because he expects the marketers he wants to reach to spend time there. He does not present it as inherently superior in every situation. The choice follows the recipient's habits.

The same recipient-centered thinking governs the subject line. Robinson describes leading with the person's inclusion in his content. That only works honestly when the content exists and the recipient really is featured.

A relevant reason to write. The published piece provides a concrete opening.
A truthful subject line. The message delivers what its preview promises.
A small initial request. Confirming a description or link is easier than evaluating a proposal.

Robinson rejects attention gained by misleading someone into opening a message. An opened email is not a success if it leaves the reader irritated or distrustful. The immediate metric can improve while the relationship gets worse.

His examples sometimes ask a recipient to confirm that a company description or link is correct before further promotion. The request gives the person something specific to respond to, while the existing article establishes that the sender has already done work.

This is a more disciplined proposition than simply working for free and waiting to be rewarded. The work has a public purpose and a targeted audience even before the prospect responds. That distinction sits alongside the question raised by Free Work That Actually Pays.

No response remains a possible outcome. Robinson's account does not erase that uncertainty; it changes what the outreach asks of the recipient. Instead of demanding immediate commercial trust, the message creates a small, credible opportunity to begin.

The Article Is Only Part of the Offer

Do presses Robinson on the economics. The starting arrangement discussed is $5,000 a month for three months, with roughly two substantial blog posts each month. Robinson describes the underlying rate as $2,500 per post.

Those are figures from the conversation, which explicitly discusses Robinson's 2017 business. They should not be mistaken for current pricing, an industry benchmark, or a promise that similar work produces similar revenue.

More importantly, the unit being sold is not just a document.

Distribution belongs inside the service.

Robinson includes publication and promotion in his consulting work. With Close.io, he describes highlighting content to his email audience and looking for appropriate opportunities to develop related stories elsewhere. The article begins a period of activity rather than ending the assignment.

That distinction changes the interpretation of the price. Counting six articles and dividing the contract total by six captures the visible deliverables, but not the entire responsibility. The engagement also includes research, editorial development, promotion, and reporting.

The three-month starting period reflects his belief that content needs time to produce results. He presents it as a trial arrangement followed by a review, not as a universal deadline by which organic marketing must succeed.

Robinson says he obtains access to clients' Google Analytics and reports on traffic sources, mentions, syndication, and promotion. Those observations help explain what happened after publication. They also give the client something more concrete than an assurance that the writing was good.

Yet he does not want traffic to become the final measure.

His preference is to focus clients on email subscribers or, for software businesses, trial signups. The meaningful question is not simply how many people reached the page, but whether the right people took an action that connected them to the business.

He illustrates the distinction with a hypothetical: a thousand relevant visitors can be more valuable than ten thousand poorly matched ones. His example then imagines a portion of those readers starting a trial, after which the company's existing marketing process takes over.

The numbers illustrate the logic. They are not reported campaign results.

This is where the consultant's responsibility meets the client's operating system. Robinson can help attract an audience and encourage a next step, but the business still needs a process for converting trial users or nurturing subscribers. Content does not replace everything downstream.

His publishing process reflects a similar respect for existing infrastructure. He prefers to work inside the client's current blog system rather than delay execution while a custom platform is built. WordPress is useful to him because he can schedule content directly instead of passing drafts through repeated copying and formatting.

The commercial offer is therefore broader than writing, but not limitless. Robinson is careful not to promise clients a mention in the publications he contributes to. He describes pitching editors only when a client example supports the larger story.

That boundary matters. An editorial relationship is not automatically a distribution channel a consultant can sell. Robinson's stated approach distinguishes controllable work from opportunities that still depend on editorial judgment, keeping the promise closer to what he can actually deliver.

Scale the Work Without Losing the Judgment

A consulting business built around one person's writing eventually encounters that person's available hours. Robinson describes working primarily as an independent practitioner while using outside writers to increase capacity.

His account is specific about where the handoff occurs. He prepares an outline, identifies the territory the article should cover, and supplies links or references that belong in the draft. A writer then develops that initial structure into a first version.

The work returns to Robinson for the editorial decisions he considers central to the service. He adds his voice, expands the depth, incorporates screenshots, and makes the piece more actionable. Delegation removes some drafting labor without removing his responsibility for the finished work.

This is not a claim that authorship can disappear behind a process. It is a division of labor with an identifiable point of control. The consultant still has to recognize what the draft lacks.

Robinson says he regularly works with three writers. That detail matters less as a staffing target than as a description of the business he is actually running: not a large agency, and not a completely solitary freelancer.

The distinction is adjacent to the career choices explored in Staff, Freelance or Entrepreneur?. Robinson's arrangement combines independent client ownership with selected outside help, rather than treating independence as an obligation to perform every task personally.

He also varies the sources of the content itself. Some assignments draw on interviews with people inside a client's company. Others are designed so he can write without waiting for another person to become available.

That is an operational choice, not merely an editorial preference. If every article depends on an interview, delayed responses can delay the entire schedule. A mix of self-contained writing and collaborative pieces gives him more flexibility.

At the more ambitious end, he describes organizing a virtual summit for Close.io and interviewing 55 people. Blog production paused while that project became the central content effort. The engagement changed format because the client wanted to try something different.

The practical production pattern he describes can be stated plainly:

Define the article's scope before assigning the first draft.
Supply the references and supporting material the writer needs.
Review for voice, depth, and practical usefulness.
Balance interview-led pieces with work that has fewer dependencies.

For professionals who do not consider writing a strength, Robinson recommends a less absolute approach than hiring a ghostwriter to do everything. An editor or content adviser can help develop a rough draft while preserving the practitioner's knowledge.

He also makes improvement conditional on willingness. Writing develops through doing it, but not everyone wants writing to become a central part of the job. Acknowledging that preference allows a more deliberate decision about collaboration.

The same principle explains why he hires design help for his own projects. He does not treat weakness in one medium as a reason to abandon publishing. He separates the expertise being communicated from every skill required to package it.

The aim is not maximum personal effort. It is a repeatable way to produce work that still bears the standard clients hired him to maintain.

The Relationship Continues After the Click

Robinson's approach to email shows what happens after content attracts attention. His mailing list is not only a place to announce completed articles. It is also a source of questions, suggestions, and direct exchanges that can influence the next piece.

Before publishing a substantial list of business books, he says he asked subscribers for their favorites. Their responses gave him additional books to consider and read before completing the article. The audience participated before the finished work arrived.

That sequence creates a different relationship from repeatedly broadcasting links. Subscribers have a reason to care about the eventual piece because their input helped shape it. The publication becomes a continuation of a conversation already underway.

His introductory email follows the same logic. It explains who he is, describes why he does the work, and asks questions. Robinson reports receiving regular replies, making the automated introduction an opening for personal correspondence rather than a dead end.

The lesson is not that email guarantees attention. Robinson acknowledges increasing competition for the subscriber's time. His response is to establish a recognizable person and a useful exchange, not to escalate the promises in the subject line.

Across the business, the same distinction appears between an activity and the outcome it is supposed to support. An article published is an activity. A relevant reader taking a next step is a different kind of result.

Robinson applies that distinction to his educational products as well. In describing his idea-validation course, he emphasizes whether students launch something, rather than whether they watch every video. Consumption alone does not prove that the teaching worked.

That provides a useful test for the content operation itself. More posts, longer guides, and a larger audience can all look productive without clarifying whether the right relationships are developing. Robinson's client metrics and course metrics point toward behavior, not just exposure.

The practical sequence running through his account is modest enough to be overlooked:

Choose a problem connected to a real area of expertise.
Create a useful resource in a format that suits that expertise.
Share it with relevant people without demanding an immediate purchase.
Promote the work and observe the actions that follow.
Use responses to develop relationships and improve the next piece.

This is a synthesis of Robinson's described practice, not a named formula or a promise of a particular return. Its strongest feature is that each stage gives the next one something credible to work with.

Near the end of the conversation, Robinson warns against expecting a dramatic price increase to work with an unchanged pitch. Higher-value consulting requires more than a larger number. His emphasis returns to relationships and a distinctive contribution that a prospective client can experience before buying.

That does not require an endless supply of unpaid custom labor. In his examples, the initial contribution is often a public resource that serves readers beyond the target company. The work has value even when one prospect never replies.

The challenge for the practitioner is therefore precise. Identify something worth teaching, show the quality of the judgment behind it, and stop confusing a first introduction with a buying decision.

A contract asks for trust. The content should give that trust somewhere to start.

TRANSCRIPT

I love parts of what I do. I've found things that I love doing. I've learned that what I love doing sort of shifts and grows and morphs over time too. How do you get more clients? It's a question that businesses small and large from Wall Street to Main Street contemplate every single day. Clients are what make your business possible and we can all use a few more clients, right? So what's the answer? You heard me say this before, but just for the record, clients hire who they know, who they trust, and who they like. It seems pretty obvious, right? You can only hire someone you know. You can only buy the services or goods of a brand you're aware of. Yet, so many creatives out there, yes, I'm talking to you, do so little to help make themselves easier to find. You can't just build a website and hope people are going to show up in droves and throw cash at you. Since this channel is dedicated to helping creative entrepreneurs succeed, I'll throw out a business term that you need to know. It's called top of the funnel awareness. And if you're not aware of this term or concept, It could be why your phone isn't ringing off the hook. How do you gain or grow awareness? You might ask. Well, you could start with search or more appropriately search engine optimization. There are many people out there who help clients get organic top of the page search results in Google. I happen to know one of them and he's on the show coming up. Ryan and I are going to talk about how he got into the business of content marketing. how his ecosystem works, and how he's creating a path for others to do the same. But first, Ryan is going to describe what it is that he does. Today, content marketing consultant. That's probably the easiest way to describe myself and what I do. And so I work with companies like Close.io, Zendesk, LinkedIn, QuickBooks, and I basically partnered with them to create long-form content for their blogs and publish it and then go out and promote it. So a lot of that is SEO. It's how to build an audience, things like that. So that's sort of, it's actually a bit of what I studied in school, taking it back. Yeah, let's see. I graduated from college in 2008. So I'm 28 now. And I've basically been doing marketing, sales-related roles ever since I graduated from college. So it's been kind of a slow build of initially getting really interested in online marketing from my online marketing class in college. And so I've got to definitely throw a shout out to my professor who really piqued my interest. Nicholas Meir is his name at Chapman University down in Orange County, California. And that was sort of where I registered the domain name for my website. I began blogging. I started sort of figuring out my way into content marketing from there. And then, yeah, led into my first job doing marketing. Okay, so if we rewind the tape a little bit, you were in high school already thinking about wanting to be working in the marketing space? College, yeah. Once I was in college, I really piqued that interest. So what did you think you were going to do when you were in high school? And the reason why I ask this is because for people like you and me who once we figured it out, we kind of zeroed in and we went deep. But there's a lot of people that are just still trying to figure it out themselves. And so they always ask me, like, how do you know this is for me? So I want to try and figure that with you. Like when did it become clear for you this is what you wanted to do? Or what ideas did you have about what you wanted to do when you grew up? You know, I don't think what I'm doing now really became clear until I would say about four years ago, five years ago maybe. I had the interest in marketing starting back in college, but you know, to be honest, when I was in high school, if we want to go back that far, I actually really thought I would go into finance or something related to finance. So accounting was one sort of consideration. Mostly because I had cousins, uncles that were accountants and the stability afforded to a profession like that is obviously one of the more attractive features. At least it was in sort of how I was taught by my parents. Like stability, job security, all those sorts of things being hailed supreme, right? Right. And accounting, finance, all those things seemed really secure. Yeah. And actually, the year I started college was the year of the financial collapse in the US, late 2007, early 2008. And so that was sort of, for me, a refocus point to where I was thinking more about seeing at this age of 18, 19 years old, job security really isn't that important. what is cracked up to be. I knew a lot of people who were, you know, five or six years older than me or friends of my parents that lost their jobs at that point in time. And so it sort of shifted me over to thinking about like running my own business. You know, what does that look like? What kind of products should I make? What kinds of services can I offer? And at that point in time, I was 18, 19 years old. I really didn't have anything. So I sort of took to taking internships as a way to begin testing my way into what I would like to do. So I had a finance internship. I interned at a mobile app development startup. And that was kind of in combination with taking some online marketing classes in college. That first internship I had at the app development startup was where I really started to get into marketing. Very interesting. So you're 18, 19. You're out of high school. You're interning while going to school. Correct. Okay. And you're in SoCal? Yep. In Orange County, right? Mm hmm. Okay. And it is as beautiful as they say it is. And so while at this mobile app startup, what did you see? What sparked that idea that this is kind of like, oh, I'm kind of getting a feeling about where this might be going? So I had a boss, the guy who started the app development company was really, really cool. And he sort of took me under his wing. One thing that I would say was a superpower of his was partnerships. So we were in Southern California. He went really hard on like, building apps for NBA players, um, partnering with like 50 cent on, on creating an app. And so his whole thing was like growing his brand and his company through partnerships with name brand people. And so, I mean, they built the app for Taco Bell, like right around when Doritos Locos Tacos came out. Um, and so I got to be there for, for witnessing that and the company just exploded. And so I was sort of in this really cool position where I was helping, um, basically the, the company try and get more app downloads was sort of my primary goal, but I got to sit in on really cool meetings with, um, important air quotes, important people. Uh, and see like what goes into structuring partnerships. You know, we were making agreements with someone like 50 Cent where it's like, okay, if we're going to, you know, basically make this app for you essentially cost-free, you need to do X, Y, and Z in promoting it and, you know, doing so until we have X number of users downloading the app from your audience. So, It was kind of a cool lesson. And, you know, for me, the different ways the marketing can go in. Okay. So now that you're seeing this whole world, how does this parallel? Then do you make a shift in school or do you focus on certain classes? How does that transpire? You know, honestly, I kind of was already on this track where I was studying business primarily, and then you could do little concentrations at Chapman. So my concentration was in entrepreneurship, and that was really going back to the thing with the financial crash. That was kind of sparked my first year in college. I decided, okay, I want to learn more about entrepreneurship and start building basically my tool set. of skills that I'll be able to use when I'm able to start my own business, when I have that right sort of idea to go with. And so I was studying business with a focus on entrepreneurship, and then I threw in marketing as well as sort of an additional focus area. And that's kind of what led to getting a little bit more interested in content marketing. And that's where I have my online marketing class. I registered my domain with that class. And that's when I began blogging. Okay, so I'm familiar with the general concept of content marketing. You've mentioned a couple of times and you kind of gave us a broad overview of it. Let's just kind of expand on that a little bit. What is the purpose of content marketing? Like why does a company engage in content marketing? I love this question. I think the definition of content marketing will vary based on who you ask, but for me, The way that I view content marketing is essentially education. So it's using your own experience, your own skills, your sort of core competencies to teach people something related to your business. So I think that the brands that are most effective at content marketing are essentially in a race to the top. to give as much possible value to their potential customers in hopes that, you know, okay, this brand is teaching me how to do, you know, 90% of, of what their paid product does. And they're, they're banking on the fact that, okay, if we can be the ultimate resource teaching you everything about, you know, sales, for example, then, you know, when you're ready to take things to the next level, you'll come and you'll buy our paid products or services. And that's, you know, essentially how I boil it down. There's tons of different mediums that you can use to deliver content marketing, things like, you know, written content, which is really my specialty, uh, Podcasting, like we're doing here, creates content. Video, interviewing people. There's a whole sort of list of different ways that you can go about content marketing. But I think, yeah, essentially at its core, it's basically using your skills and experience to teach other people something. And then basically you say it's a race to the top. And the thing that you didn't say but you implied was this content is given away for free. Yes, yeah, good distinction. So I think that the best content marketing is given away for free. You see plenty of stuff that's like a gated course or an e-book where people exchange their email address or a dollar or something to grab a free trial or to pick up your free resource that's more in-depth. But my argument with content marketing and being a race to the top is that everybody Everyone is publishing 2,000, 3,000 word blog posts now. And so the bar for delivering value is continually being moved up. Okay, so how does one, if you're in a field and you have a core competency, the assumption is then there are a lot of other people in the same space. How do you make your content stand out that it's more valuable than the next guy's? That is the million dollar question. Yeah. I can tell you how I've done it. I think it's different for everyone. I think it does have to back into what your own unique strengths are, right? So speaking to someone like, you know, designers, maybe we have a lot of designers listening. So I wouldn't, if I was a designer, I wouldn't be trying to write 10,000 word blog posts. I would be going out and doing like super in-depth design teardowns for the brands that I want to work with, or, you know, coming up with critiques on what they're, you know, if a, if a company just did a rebrand, I want to work with them on a project. I would do some sort of critique or come up with, you know, like a video talking about these are the biggest mistakes this brand made in their rebrand or the things that I like about it. So I would be taking what I view as my own unique strengths and applying it to creating something unique. So for me, what that usually backs into is writing is fairly easy for me. So I really don't publish anything on my blog anymore that's less than 5,000 words. most posts I would say around 10,000 words in length and it's just because I'm trying to be the definitive resource on a topic every time I publish something and that's sort of how I've chosen to differentiate myself and I think there are tons of examples of people who you know someone like Gary Vaynerchuk obviously is in a very different place than just about anyone else today with the size of his audience, but I One thing that he has done really, really well since day one is use video to his advantage. So the dude is incredibly high energy. He can just go on and on and on and on with a camera point in front of him. So he leaned into that. And video has been like the biggest part of his strategy since day one. He's not primarily a writer. So dude's got millions of YouTube followers or yeah, on his YouTube channel. So that's kind of how he's chosen to differentiate himself. Mm-hmm. So a lot of what you're talking about, you're talking when you say design teardowns or critiques or biggest mistakes, you're providing your opinion as a quote unquote expert on something that's happened. So if you say something that's been very hot, a couple of like logo rebrands, things like that, people love, especially within the design community, love to like tear those things apart. So you're going to opine on that. So how does that help you ultimately gather or gain a client for yourself? If you attack clients, the Dropbox redesign or the F1 logo redesign. How does that help you? I think, you know, personally what I do when I'm taking this process is I will just create my content similar to if I were to do a design teardown. I would publish an end up post on my blog that I know there's this, you know, group of companies that I want to build relationships with. And so I will mention them in my blog posts. And with the example of a design teardown, you're basically doing this for them. So what I do after this thing is published, whatever it is, is I'll reach out to people at the company and I'll reach out to tons of people if I don't hear back from the first person I reach out to. And I'll just sort of go on down the line of, for me wanting to hit someone in marketing because that's going to be the decision maker like a director of content marketing or something would be the decision maker for hiring a freelancer like myself and so you know speaking to kinda that the designer persona here view create a tear down I would reach out to a creative director or someone in a similar role and just say, you know, don't ask him for anything. Just say like, hey, I created this, you know, this teardown. I love this. I hated this. Just wanted to share my thoughts and and kind of leave it at that. Don't don't expect them to to immediately say, oh, my God, I want to hire you. But it's all about building relationships. And and I will put a little caveat on this with the majority of people I reach out to after I publish content. It doesn't turn into a paid relationship upon immediately, you know, first email or first conversation. It's all a longer term relationship building experience. And how are you reaching out to them? Are you reaching out to them via Twitter, email or something like that? I do email. I think you can argue for any platform if it's clear that they're spending their time there. So primarily, I'm thinking most of the people who are content marketers are spending a lot of time in their inbox. And that's why I go for. I see. And how did you acquire the email address in the first place? Is it through sleuthing around? Did you buy a list? How did you get that? Oh man, I'm a hardcore internet sleuth. Um, I talk all about this process in a like 10,000 word post on my blog. It's actually, uh, It's ryrob.com slash cold. And then it'll take you to this humongous post on doing cold outreach. But to kind of like boil it down into its basically essential elements, I will go to LinkedIn and first figure out who I want to reach out to. So got to know who first. And so for me, reaching out to marketers, I'll type in like marketing in the search bar. And then I'll click people with the skill of marketing or with the job title of marketing. And then I'll filter on the side with... you know, this specific company. So then I get this list of people who are related to marketing at, you know, say Trello, for example. Um, and then from there, I, I've been doing this long enough to now know that there are basically five or six email naming conventions that 90% of companies and people will use. So, you know, something like first name at, or first dot last at, um, And I'll just basically cycle through those and verify using a Chrome extension for Gmail called "Reportive." It's R-A-P-P-O-R-T-I-V-E. And basically, when you have this Reportive extension installed, when you hover over an email address, so, you know, again, typing in firstname@trello.com, when I hover over that with my cursor, a little sidebar will pop up on the right. And if that email address is indeed Connected to their LinkedIn account. So again, not always 100% accurate But if they have their work email connected to their gmail account, it'll pop up a ton of information It'll pull in all this stuff from their LinkedIn profile, you know links to Twitter Facebook job title and so that's kind of how I will just guess and check and I'm sure some people are listening right now and kind of foaming at the mouth while other people are cringing saying, "Uh-oh, my email isn't safe anymore because guys like Ryan can just dive in and figure it out." Those are some excellent tips and because somebody might be jogging or listening to this in the car, I just want to go over the website again. It's ryrob.com and it's R-Y like Ryan, ryrob.com/cold. C-O-L-D, correct? Correct. And you have a massive article on exactly what you just talked about. So you guys just got the high level way of snaking your way around and finding people's email address. I took notes there. I did take notes. And I will say I'm currently, I'm in the early stages of building a tool to essentially automate this process, which, you know, for some people might be even scarier. So you would just punch in a person's name and a company and they, you know, just figure it out. Right, so basically, yeah, the idea is a Chrome extension that can scan... any page, so think a blog post, and then determine, you know, who are the key decision makers in marketing at the company behind all the URLs, all the external URLs on the page. So this is like a hardcore content marketer tool. And then from there, like once you have your list of people, then it cycles through this testing process and presents you with, you know, the most likely email address for them. Mm hmm. So that's great. That was super actionable. What you're doing, I think some people refer to as social prospecting when you're going on LinkedIn and you're looking for somebody very specific to talk to in the company. And this is a great way to do it. Beautiful job there. Nerds! Introducing NerdWallet's 2025 Best of Awards list. Your shortcut to the best credit cards, savings accounts, and more. The nerds have done the work for you. Researching and reviewing over 1100 financial products to bring you only the best of the best. Looking for a balanced transfer credit card with 0% APR? They've got a winner for that. Or a bank account with a top rate to hit your savings goals? They've got a winner for that too. Know you're getting the best products for you without doing all the research yourself. 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And so what you're doing is trying to make it real easy because I think everybody has their guard up when you try to market to them right away. They shut that stuff down because that's what everybody's doing to them. So you'll write an article that you think will be interesting to a handful of people, somebody with a marketing title in their in their name somewhere, and you'll you'll share that with them via email. That's totally clear. So then what happens after that? I'll usually sort of frame my outreach around subject line to get even more tactile here, subject line of something like your feature on my blog, or if it's for one of my publication columns, your feature on Forbes. And honestly, who doesn't want to open an email like that, right? That's kind of the step one is writing a subject line that your prospect is going to, you know, number one, care about. But then number two, not be pissed that they opened the email. So you don't want to do something that's super slimy, like, you know, I can't even think of a bad example of a subject line right now, but something that basically tricks them into opening your email because that's as bad as never being opened. Exactly. Exactly. - Right. - Exactly. So, you know, I'll keep the initial email as sort of like, you know, hey, just featured you in this post over here. wanted to make sure this was the right way to describe the company or something like that. And I'll sort of call to action, like, you know, click through, check it out, make sure the mention is right or that I have the correct link in here. And I'll say that, you know, before I start promoting it or before I syndicate it over to Inc. Magazine or something like that. So sort of adding that urgency component to it as well. Now I'm going to imagine Ryan, there's an article on this that you've written as well on how to write subject lines and get an engaging email going. Correct or incorrect. That is all lumped into that same post on cold. Oh yeah. Two for one. So I break down, I break down different types of case studies and use cases within that post. Yeah. And there's tons of screenshots and stuff. It's, It's honestly one of my most exciting posts I've written in a long time. Do you know the stats on that? The numbers of how many people have looked at that page? I looked at this like a couple of weeks ago. It's been about somewhere between, I'd say now between 40 and 50,000 hits. Wow. Since it went up in, I think it went up in like July of this year, 2017. Is that considered a high performing article or post for you? That is climbing into being a high performer. So my real metric of success is ranking in the top three positions for organic search in Google. So it's now on the bottom, I think, of page one, if you type in cold email or cold emailing, cold email template, how to write cold emails, things like that. So for some of those keyword phrases, it's cracking the first page. And And God, we could go so deep on how to get it up to the top. But that is something I'm working on. Yeah. Okay. So now we know what your metric is. That's great. So here's an SEO question here because I'm asking Twitter to help me out too because my relationship with you is pretty new. It's through a mutual friend, Ian Padgett. And so I've asked my community like, hey, what do you want me to ask Ryan? So here it goes, Bernard Borg. And this is the first time I'm doing this. It's almost like a real-time offset time thing. So he wants to know, what is the future of SEO? I know that's a big, broad question. So how do you want to handle that? Yeah. Oh, my God. Huge, broad question. I think, I mean, taking it from the highest level first, I think that, you know, looking back 10 years ago and seeing what content was like then and what the search engines rewarded as content back then and zooming up to today. It's basically SEO is moving towards cutting out the shit and only delivering hyper relevant, targeted, in-depth answers to the questions people are asking. So, you know, people are basically moving towards searching in terms of, questions, right? So you'll type in questions or you'll type in a phrase that's related to a question. So taking my example of cold emailing, some people will type in how to write cold email. And you might not use the question mark anymore. You kind of just expect that this keyword phrase of how to write a cold email will return the right results for you. And I think the search engines are getting better and better at detecting who's trying to game the system by just like keyword stuffing. So if you have like an article that's a thousand words long, you know, being a short article in my opinion, and you have the words cold email in succession, like, you know, a hundred times or something within that article, then you're probably going to get hit for being spammy content. So that's kind of why I lean towards, and then this sort of backs into the future of SEO and content marketing, I think is that depth is becoming more important and content is only going to keep getting longer whether that's you know video content that is then transcribed and posted onto a page for SEO benefits or you know just written content I think it's only going to be getting longer because that's that's sort of what the search engines are rewarding currently there they reward depth they reward what they think the best answer is going to be not just something that's that's that's listing a keyword X number of times. So I think SEO is now less mechanical and more of an art. So the people that have tried to game the system early on are going to be penalized. So I guess what I'm hearing from you is if you want to do well, you have to actually create something of value and be the expert, the authority on something. Right. And I think that that authority, if we're talking SEO, that authority can come from a lot of different ways. And I think, you know, primarily what people should be, people who are listening today should be thinking of in terms of authority is like getting massive sites or reputable sites, high domain authority sites to point towards your content. And that's sort of comes back into the picture of where, you I'm a contributor for sites like Forbes and Entrepreneur Business Insider. And I do that largely because it gives me an opportunity to tastefully, with an asterisk, do it tastefully. You can't be a self-promoter, an endless self-promoter rather. But when I have the opportunity to write for some of these sites and point back at my content to basically, here's a preview. on Forbes and here's where you can go to get a more in-depth guide version of this if you want. And having those links from those sites that have been around forever that Google recognizes as highly authoritative is the way to build up your own domain authority. How do those publications tend to view this back linking strategy? It's become something that honestly everyone does. So you see like, you know, a reaction to this from Entrepreneur Magazine. They now do no follow links on all external links from their publication. So that's a way of sort of like, cutting some of the SEO benefit, you could say. And a nofollow link for everyone listening who doesn't know what that is, is basically it's a link from entrepreneur to, you know, back to my blog. If I do that link, they're nofollowing it, which means they're not passing SEO benefits. They're telling Google, you know, don't reward this link as something valuable, basically. So you can still get traffic from something like that. So there's a value there. But But a lot of the publications are moving in this direction of like, if everyone is using this as a distribution channel to promote themselves, we're going to take some of that promotion benefit away. But at the same time, it's kind of like, they want and need people to be contributing good content anyway. So it's a balancing act. And I think you see some publications fall on one side of the argument, some on others, right? So the sites like Forbes will continue giving value to those external links because they get... I mean, gosh, probably well over 100 plus contributor articles submitted a day. And that's sort of what they rely on to be competitive is free content. Mm-hmm. So the idea of the nofollow link, this is like coded into the site somehow where it says don't help them with SEO. You can still send traffic that way. And they do that because maybe they feel like they don't want to get used, like you're gaming them in a way. But at the same token, they're getting free content from you as a writer contributor and assuming you don't get paid for any of that stuff, right? Right. I think, you know, me personally, I choose not to get paid from the sites I contribute to because when you take a paid arrangement with them, it usually comes with some sort of minimum contribution. So like with Forbes, I think the deal was if you want to get paid, you You have to submit five articles a month. And for me, that would be a lot on top of client work and things like that. So it kind of depends on what makes sense for you. And I think most people that I know who took the paid route earn between, I think, like $700 and $1,000 a month. So it's much less that you earn per article than I do going out and being a consultant. But again... Sometimes they try and get creative with their rewards. They compensate you for, you know, if you have an article that does 100,000 page views for them, then you'll get rewarded based on page views to some degree. Before we continue, here's John Roth. Heyo, John Roth here from the future. I'm here to tell you guys about the pro membership. A lot of you have been asking about how you can engage with us and where you can go to meet like-minded individuals. Well, I'm here to tell you how. For $75 a month with the pro membership, you can join Chris Doe's collective of creative entrepreneurs, which includes everyone from designers to strategists to writers and more from all over the world. Also included is over 40 hours of exclusive videos on a variety of topics from the business of design to project management and access to two pro calls a month where you can have your questions answered by Chris live. All that and more in your pro membership for just $75 a month. Not afraid of commitment? Sign up for a year and save $150. The Pro Membership, exclusively in the online store. Go to thefuture.com slash shop for more. Well, you mentioned this a couple of times as a consultant. So what do you do? What is the main way that you make your income? The majority of what I do, that comes from the content marketing consulting stuff. So that's like with, you know, I've mentioned Close.io a few times. They've been my favorite client that I've ever had. And so with them, like I originally, this is such a funny story. I originally opened this relationship with their founder, CEO, Steli Efti. by reaching out and letting him know about a feature on my blog. So it's kind of one of those full circle stories of me grabbing a quote that he had from some video or some talk he gave. I implemented it into a blog post. I got my blog post up to like a thousand shares and then I reached out and said, "Hey, you know, this post on my blog is getting a lot of traction. Just wanted to let you know about this." And that sort of evolved into this relationship where now I'm creating content for their blog. And so I'll write two or three posts per month for them. And then built into that is the promotion. So I promise them, you know, like highlighting the post to my email list of, you know, 37,000 subscribers and going out and I'm careful, you know, not to promise that I'm going to mention them on any of the publications I write for because that's a definite no, no. Right. But I will say like, hey, you know, over the course of two to three months after this blog post goes live, I'm going to be pitching my editors on content that we could weave in, you know, stories and examples that we pull from the Close.io blog also. Okay. And so when it supports a greater story that I'm already working on, then that's when I'm able to sort of tastefully weave in this resource as well. And so that's kind of my main gig. That's sort of the process I follow with. All the clients I work for, some of the other ones, Intuit, Zendesk, QuickBooks. Yeah, things like that. That's my primary. Are these clients that you have on retainer or is it for a period of time and then they move on? Honestly, it depends. It varies for every single relationship I've ever had. The Close.io one is on retainer, which is nice. So I like to try and always have one solid retainer contract on and then the others will be a little bit one-off. So like with QuickBooks, that's totally one-off. I can just pitch them anytime I feel like taking on new projects. Um, and if, if the pitch is up their alley, then they'll say, sure, let's go for it. Or they'll have, you know, some tweaks to it or, or shoot it down. Right. Um, And then I've got some clients where I'll just like take something on like once a month-ish and we kind of like fall into a routine with each other. But yeah, I definitely go for some sort of monthly recurring contract whenever I can. Yeah. And I think you are very upfront about your pricing because I was looking at your site and said something like, here's the minimum that you need. You need to have at least $5,000 a month for at least three months to start working with me. And then you can start talking. Can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah, yeah, totally. So, you know, speaking to the three month thing, content marketing takes time to pay off, especially if you're not already doing it. And so that's kind of why I set my price to the point that it's at, you know, $2,500 per blog post, essentially. And, and in order to see results, you really need to publish about twice a month, something in depth, at least. And And, you know, after you publish, we're going to spend a ton of time promoting the content as well. And so that's sort of where, where I've backed into that frequency. And then, you know, the three months being the time to pay off. And, and yeah, that's, that's kind of the, the, loose starting arrangement that I begin most of my consulting contracts with is, is basically 5,000 a month for three months. And then at the end of that three months, I provide kind of a detailed report of like, you know, I get Google analytics access for my clients. Um, So I'm able to show like, this is how much traffic we drove and it came from these sources and we got, you know, these syndications and these mentions and these influencers promoted and things like that. So it's kind of like the three month is a trial and then we'll see from there where we'd like to go. And what kind of results are the clients hoping for? So they've agreed to pay you what seems to be at least $15,000 for six blog posts and And I want to get a little bit more into the mechanics of that. But at the end of that three months, what are they hoping to get? Almost all of them. And this is a metric that can be sort of chosen by the clients. But almost all my clients, I will really strongly encourage to say, let's not worry as much about traffic, but let's worry more about email subscribers or for more of a SaaS business, trial sign up. So we'll kind of optimize for like, not just can we get 10,000 people to your blog, but can we get the right 1,000 people? And if we do this the right way from that 1,000, maybe we'll have 50 to 100 people sign up for a trial. And once people sign up for the trial, the rest of their marketing funnel should kick in and they should be converting on their average figures. So that's kind of like, What I attempt at least to get people to care most about is email subscribers or trial signups. Yeah. And so when you're doing this, are you building a landing page for this content or is it integrated into whatever system they already have in terms of like a blog post thing? I will always integrate into whatever system they currently have just for the sake of not having to, you know, push for a month while we build a blog or build out a custom sort of, you know, content delivery mechanism. So, you know, typically, Most of the startups I work for have a blog that runs on WordPress, which is a dream because I can just pop in and schedule content directly rather than having to go through Google Docs and someone else has to copy and paste and reformat and stuff like that. Right. And so if you're working for Zendesk or any one of these companies, how is it that you're able to create the content for them? Do you have to interview them? Do you have to hire writers to do this? How are you able to do that? That honestly, I mean, that varies also from client to client. With some of them, like with Close.io, I recently did a big project where I actually hosted a virtual summit for them. So I went out and I interviewed 55 people. And that was the content that I created for two months for them. So we paused blog posts. We wanted to try something new, basically. And so other examples would be, yeah, interviewing someone on their team to sort of fuel, like, this is an expert talking about this topic. And so we'll weave an interview into an overarching keyword phrase that we're going after. But I would say, like, half of the content I do is intentionally designed to be written solely by me without needing to rely on anyone else for anything and I kind of do that just so that I have content that I can you know crank out and get a quick win right away that way I'm not like waiting for so-and-so on their team to get back to me or for the 10 people I emailed for an interview series to get back to me and schedule time to do it so I like to vary it Did you say, I just want to get this right, did you say like 50% of the content is written by you? Oh yeah, totally. 50% of the content is written by me. I do have a team of writers that now helps me out because my volume has grown beyond what I can personally do. So the way that I sort of look at the outsourcing component is I'll outsource first drafts. So I'll put together an outline for what I see a post does. covering and then I'll like throw in like a few links like let's you know let's link to this study let's have some you know stats pulled from this article or this guide and then I'll sort of give them like direction and then I'll say go and then like within two or three days I'll get back a first draft and then I'll sort of you know inject my voice go in and add more depth and pull in screenshots and make it more of a tactical piece of content but yeah that's That's how I've been able to basically scale this process. I see. But the way I'm getting the feeling, because you described yourself as a freelancer, so you primarily work by yourself and you outsource some things to people off-site that help you, and that way you can continue to take on the workload that you're taking on? Exactly. Yeah, I've got, I would say, three regular writers that I use to help me with first drafts. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Okay, so how long have you been working as an independent content marketing expert? That's a loaded question. I didn't think it was. I love that. Well, I've been doing content marketing for, I guess, really, like seriously, for four years. But, you know, as a consultant, two years. Yeah. So I was able to quit my last quote-unquote day job doing content marketing in... Let's see, that was early 2016. I see. And then I was, I booked a contract with LinkedIn. So that was my first, my first really big client, which is amazing. That is very cool. This is okay. It's just in case you guys are for whatever reason weren't paying attention We're asleep at the beginning of the show. Ryan is a pretty young guy We were just talking about it because I'm a pretty old guy myself and he's only 28 So the timeline all makes sense to me So you've been working for about four years two of those have been independent and just you doing your thing, right? Yep, okay, right? All right. So Everybody's probably listening to this and thinking, "This sounds like a pretty good gig and the numbers sound really good too." So to do something that you love, to kind of give your opinion on things and to kind of use your expertise to make a living, that sounds amazing. That's like being an artist. This is incredible. How much money does somebody like you make in a year? I was just looking at what my 2017 is shaping up to be, so I'll give you that. It's going to be right around $170,000. And that's not all from content marketing consulting. That's not all from that? No, not at all. So my blog gets about 200,000 monthly readers. So I've got a couple of ad platforms set up, affiliate links, and that kind of just sits on autopilot essentially. And that's like a few thousand dollars a month in relatively passive income. I should do an income report, by the way, to break this all down. Yes, absolutely. A guy who is a business, an entrepreneur major should know these things, right? Yes. Yeah. And it's about $20,000 in course sales too. How much? About $20,000 in online course sales. Okay. All right. So if we were to break up the pie... If you take your annual income of $170,000, what percentages would you kind of divvy things up in terms of consultation? That's got to be the bulk of it, right? Oh, that's definitely, that's like probably 70% would be my guess. Okay. Yeah. And then courses would come next. Courses. Certainly. Let's talk about your courses a little bit. I know that you teach on a couple of different platforms and you also offer your own course too, right? Yeah, yeah, I've got a few different courses. I don't have a content marketing course yet, which is a huge black hole right now. That's a major void in my life. So my goal for next year is to get a content marketing course up. But my biggest course right now is on idea validation. So it kind of like walks you through the process of I've got this idea for a business. How do I go about acquiring my first handful of customers without spending a ton of time and money, essentially? And how much does that cost? That one is, I think it's now, it's on a waiting list right now. So I'm not taking new students because I've got about 150 that are very time consuming to keep up with kind of coaching one-on-one to some degree. I want to say it was $199 or $799 with like a more hands-on coaching with me. I see. So $199 gets you in, but if you want more one-on-one, it's $799. Right. Yeah. The $7.99 was like, you know, we do two phone calls a month together versus the $1.99 was more of like, you know, we have a Facebook group. We have a couple other like discussion boards, Slack group, things like that. Right. And what do you get for that course? Are there video content? Is there what do you get? Yeah, you get video lectures, written lectures. Again, my superpower, right? So way better at writing super in-depth content than doing direct-to-camera stuff. So I leaned on the written stuff. You basically get a ton of... you know, private lectures written by me. And then, yeah, like PDF workbooks, things that are designed to get you from just consuming advice to taking action. Because I think that's, especially for a course like idea validation, that's by far the most important metric is, you know, how many students go through and actually end up launching something at the end of the course versus how many, you know, watched every video. Yeah. And where else are you teaching other platforms? That's actually it. I've done like little small guest appearances on some Udemy courses. But that's really it. Like I self-host all my courses. Oh, okay. For some reason, I thought I read somewhere that you're also on Skillshare. Ah, so I did do like a guest appearance on a content marketing course there. Yeah, it was kind of like an interview style thing, though. I see. Okay. I got another question coming in here. And I think we already talked about this, but let's just make sure that Farai, I think that's how you say his name. He's like, is email marketing still effective? Oh, absolutely. I think it's, you know, for me, at least, that's sort of my home base for when I launch a new piece of content is I go to my email list and I'll send an email update or, you know, like if I'm planning on doing a post on a topic that I know my audience is going to love. I will ping them like the week before I publish a post and I'll ask them a question. Like, you know, one example is I published this post earlier this year on my picks for the best, like I think 75 business books that I've ever read. And before I published that post, I sent an email to my list and I said, what are your favorite business books? And so I had people weigh in in the comments section of where this post is eventually going to be. And so then I was able to, you know, take all their suggestions into account, spend a month reading some of these other books and figuring out which ones I might want to add into my list. And then, Yeah, I was able to publish the post about a month after that and then get another spike of, you know, one to two thousand people clicking through from my email list and reading the post. So I say email marketing 100%. Yeah. But I mean, if you don't have a list to send your emails to, then it's not going to be your most effective channel. Um, aside from if you're in like the validation stage. So, you know, if, if you're using email marketing to start conversations with people, then I think, yes, it can be very useful. Hmm. Well, I don't think we're alone in this. We have a pretty good email list. And when we shoot it on email to our list, we get great results, high conversion, high open rates because they're all interested in the content that we want to share with them. And so I don't know why he's asking that question in terms of is it still effective as if I guess everybody's inbox is getting really crowded these days. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's there's definitely sort of an in art to curating that relationship with the individual subscriber, because I think there's, there's more demand for their attention than there ever has been. But I mean, moving forward, it's only going to go up and up and up. So you do have to stand out. And I think the way that you stand out with email marketing is not by having clickbaity email subject lines. I think it's by starting out the relationship in a very sort of, you know, one-on-one, hi, I'm Ryan, like my first... When you sign up for anything on my site, you get an autoresponder that says, "Hello from Ryan." And I kind of just tell them about me and why I do what I do, and I ask them some questions. And I get, God, probably like a dozen responses a day to the questions I ask in those introduction emails. That's great. Good tip there. Okay, so you've been talking a lot about superpower, and you've been talking about it from the beginning to now even, because that's your superpower is writing. or one of your superpowers. Well, what if that's not your superpower and we understand the importance of writing and becoming an expert through words? Do you have any tips for people who wouldn't describe themselves as that's their core competency? You know, I'm a big believer in outsourcing also what I'm not great at. So if I can find someone who is, you know, taking an example with my podcast, like I am by no means a designer, but I have someone who designs my header images, who designs every image that I use on my blog, who who makes all the logos that I use for different projects. And so my advice would definitely be to find someone that you can outsource writing help to. And it doesn't have to mean like, you know, go find a ghostwriter to do 100% of your content, but, you know, do what you can to write out a first draft and then find someone who can be more of an editor or a content advisor for you. And I think that it's something that, you know, you're only going to get better at writing if you want to get better at writing and if you keep doing it. And so acknowledge right now if that's something that you want to do. And I think if you don't, that's when you start moving towards the direction of having someone who can be more of like a full-time writer for you. Yeah. You mentioned a bunch of business books that you thought were great. Is there a book that you think might help somebody kind of get their head wrapped around how to communicate their thoughts? A writing book maybe? You know, I don't have a specific writing book that comes top of mind, but I will say, you know, as someone who learns through doing a lot, I think just reading anything from Malcolm Gladwell will definitely point you in the right direction for how to become a better writer. You know, everything from the words he uses, like he uses such just like awesomely descriptive words and language in his content to, you know, you know, like his structure for how he tackles an entire section of the book. Like he'll do, you know, point, example, point, or he'll have, you know, these three studies that he references and he pulls insights from them. I think it's, he's a really good person to just take some cues from. And I see like influencing, you know, him influencing a lot of my writing style since I began reading his work. That's a great tip. Malcolm Gladwell. He's the, it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something, right? He popularized that. Yeah. That wasn't his original research, but I think in the book Outliers, I want to say he popularized that. Yeah. Okay. Let's see here. And I'm looking, I've got like six pages of notes here. Is there a question or something that I need to ask you about or something we should be talking about? You know, I think like if there was one other thing I just wanted to touch on it even more than we did earlier, it was just that like for, for the people listening today who want to get to a level where you're charging, you know, four or five figures for consulting agreements instead of just doing, you know, a hundred dollar, $200 logo designs or, or whatever that may be. I think it's, it's really important to say it's, such a long game. Like, I don't think you can go in expecting to just, you know, quadruple your prices tomorrow and have the exact same kind of pitch. I think you need to really focus on the relationship building. So I guess this is kind of coming full circle into what we were talking about earlier. It's like, you know, you're not going to get a hundred thousand dollar check the, the day that you send a cold email to someone. So figure out what you can uniquely provide and then just start doing that for free at first and give them a sample of that value until Until they're willing to get on a more serious conversation with you about paid projects I love that it really resonates with what we're trying to do at the future Which is to try to give away as much as possible for as little as possible knowing that this value that you create for the world it doesn't go to waste and So eventually when we make a product or launch a course, people know that the value is going to be there. So it's a very easy decision for them to purchase or support us in one way or the other. - Exactly. - So you're writing, you've created an audience for yourself. You position yourself as a content marketing expert, which you've been able to convert into currency and equity for other clients. Sometimes that work is interesting to you and sometimes it's not. I assume the things that ring more true to who you are and your self-expression, the happier you are. And writing things about you don't care about as much, then it becomes a job. Does some of this lead you into being sought after as a public speaker or things like that? Do you enjoy that aspect of it? I'm honestly still learning about that. I've done, let's see the, the first, like what I would say real public speaking gig I did was, uh, this summer. So summer of 2017. Um, Oh my gosh, what's it called? How design live. There we go. So a lot of your listens are probably familiar with it. Um, It was in Chicago, I think, this summer, or maybe it was in spring. But that was my first real paid speaking gig, and I had a blast doing that. Everything from preparation to delivering it to, honestly, just having conversations with people is what I really liked the most. So peeling off the one-on-one relationships, I've had a dozen or so people that I still keep in touch with that I met at How Design. Mm-hmm. And just from a personal level, I mean, you were talking about sharing your expertise. It's an education thing. That's really what content marketing should be about. Do you feel differently about this when you actually see people and not just like write something and you talk to them and you see how you're connecting with them? Does that affect you differently? I would say, yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm able to, when I am like one-on-one with someone and I'm teaching them about content marketing or, or freelancing or whatever it may be, um, I'm able to really sort of tailor that conversation. Um, I, I hesitate to call it education or teaching because I think I learned something from everyone that I work with in this capacity one-on-one. Um, But yeah, I'd say it sort of gets individualized and I'll take things away that I learn from when I'm talking about content marketing. I'll have someone like bring up an interesting idea or share something, you know, small that worked for them. And I'm like, no, no, no, don't, don't ignore that little thing that worked like just because, you know, the 10 best content marketers, you know, Haven't said it works like dig into that little unique thing that's working for you And I think that's that's what I would say is the biggest takeaway from doing the one-on-one stuff. Definitely Do you love what you do? I love parts of what I do. I've found things that I love doing Um, I i've learned that you know what I love doing sort of shifts and grows and morphs over time, too um I'm getting to a point where I don't love as much writing actual client work. I still love writing for my own blog. There's just something like so liberating and freeing about when I'm writing for my own blog where I just don't have to care about the format or the language I use. And it's just like raw me. But the more I take on client work over the years, I'd say the less stimulating it tends to be. And that's not always the case. Some client work, I get to talk about subjects that I'm much more interested in than others. With something like QuickBooks, it's a lot more financially heavy. And so that's not as interesting to me as when I can talk about something like freelancing or how to build a consulting business. So that's kind of been a growing evolution of learning what I love and seeing how that changes over time. Is there a way that you see yourself doing more of what you love and less of what you don't love and still grow your business and make money? Oh, yes. Yes. And I kind of alluded to it earlier. I'm working on a SaaS tool of sorts that sort of helps content marketers or even salespeople to automate outreach. And using sort of the Chrome extension of grabbing links and finding who you should reach out to at the companies behind those links and then sending emails to them. That's kind of my what I see as the future of stepping into having a business that is more of a subscription based service where I don't have to worry about how I'm going to scale my individual writing. Right. Because the writing stuff's not scalable. I mean, it is to a degree, but I would reach a point where I'm literally just being an editor instead of doing any writing. And that's not very fun. This idea of you creating this subscription model or some kind of tool for SaaS, are you spending your own money investing in this to build this product out? Because I assume you're not a developer. You're not coding the software yourself. Yeah, that's a really good question. So right now I haven't invested any money, just time. And what I'm trying to do, so I'm cobbling together little bits and pieces of it from friends essentially. And I'm trying to find the right partner who is a developer who has... the right skills to help me bring this to life from a technical standpoint and then I will be bringing the audience and the promotion and the selling and the relationship building the partnerships things like that so I'm actually kind of in the process of trying to find a partner for it really I see so this is still kind of early on in the the gestation of your idea in terms of it becoming an actual product Oh, yes. Right now, it's essentially a bunch of cobbled together Excel spreadsheets. I see. I only have one last question for you. And it's somebody just slipped in. I was going to wrap up the show. But Maria wants to know this thing. Maria wants to know which traffic gaining strategies should new blogs prioritize? Ooh, I personally believe that when you're brand new to any content creation, whether it's, you know, if you have a blog or if you're wanting to do a YouTube channel or a podcast, whatever, I think that your biggest bang for your buck is always going to be in guest posting. So when you're first getting started, you're probably not going to have the ability to get onto the sites like, you know, Forbes, Business Insider, Entrepreneur Inc. They look for people who have more seasoned track records, but they're not going to have But you can go to people that have established blogs within your space and pitch them on content that their audience would be interested in and then do it for free. But what you get out of it is this person who maybe has 50,000 blog readers a month or even more. You can find people who are interested in taking guest posts who have millions of readers per month. Um, I take guest posts all the time from friends or from, you know, people who just have a really, really good idea and they're great at what they want to write about. So I think go out and guest post, um, use the strategies I talk about in the post on cold emailing on my blog. Uh, And you can definitely, definitely land some guest posts. That's a great suggestion. So it sounds to me like you're saying you got to cut your teeth on something. You got to gain some traction. So there's this middle step. You might not get to Forbes or Entrepreneur Magazine or Fast Company right away, but there's a bunch of people in the middle between where you're at and where they're at and just offer up ideas to them, write a post, and hopefully they'll post it on their blog. Is that the idea? Exactly. Yeah, that's the idea in a nutshell. And what I do to help scale this, or what I have done in the past, rather, is my process is like, I'm going to publish this. the most in-depth thing on my blog first. So don't neglect writing for your own blog, still write for your blog, but take, you know, like if you're, if you're talking about the 10 steps to do something within a post on your blog, take step number three and pitch that as just an idea as a guest post to someone. And you can write up something, you know, shorter that can just expand on that one little minute topic. And then, you know, within your post, link back to and here's where to learn more about all my other blah blah steps to the process so make it easy for yourself yeah that sounds great so you're saying like don't give all your best stuff away you got to be able to develop and nurture your own blog too right Right. And I think, you know, there could be examples of times when it's worth giving your best stuff away. Like if you have the opportunity through a mutual connection to write for a blog that, you know, you know, 100,000 people are going to see that post, then, you know, it's worth going all out for those opportunities, for sure. Okay. hey i just want to thank you ryan i i think you're a breath of fresh air most people especially i don't want to say like an old man but your age aren't so confident to share in such a transparent way but i think it fits as part of your whole ethos about education and and in doing so you establish expertise you've done really well for yourself i wish i could say that a couple years out of school i was making the kind of money that you're making that's fantastic just wish you the best just because of what you're trying to do. And in a way that you're just, the conversation that we're having is so actionable and so just concise and clear cut. So I'm going to recommend everybody go check out your website. So how do people find out more about you and to get in touch with you? Yeah, I am Mr. Accessible. So you can email me anytime. I'm just Ryan, R-Y-A-N, at ryrob.com. And that's R-Y-R-O-B, as in boy. So yeah, that's my blog. That's the home base, really, for everything, for the podcast, the courses, the guides, the blog content. And yeah, I mean, I'm most active on social with Twitter. So I'm the T-H-E Ryan Robinson there. I'm Ryan Robinson and you're listening to The Future. The Future is hosted by me, Chris Do. The show is edited by Stuart Schuster. Big thanks to Adam Sanborn who composed our theme song. To subscribe to The Future podcast, check us out on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, and now SoundCloud. Make sure you rate and review our episodes. Don't miss out on upcoming events, live streams, workshops, and announcements by going to thefuture.com and sign up for the newsletter link at the bottom. You can also find us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at The Future Is Here. Thanks for listening. That's it for this episode. See you in the future. Marketing is hard. But I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads. Go to LibsynAds.com. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N ads.com today.

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